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Originally Posted by Catlady
Elfwreck, two words for you: slippery slope.
What next? Do you decide to change a male character to a female character because you think girl readers don't have a role model to identify with?
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Why, yes... I've done exactly this. Still tweaking the formatting, but I've got a complete genderswapped version of Cory Doctorow's
Little Brother.
I think I'll put that at the top of my priority list, now that you've reminded me of it.
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Do you decide that a character's non-PC statements should be revised? Where do you stop?
Isn't it better not to start on that slippery slope? Leave the damn "aeroplane" alone, leave all of it alone to stand or fall on its own merits.
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You may believe that great literature should left to history fans to appreciate; some of us think that great stories deserve to survive even in a different culture from the one they were written in. If that means translating a few cultural identifiers to ones that new readers will recognize, some of us are okay with that.
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Write your own book, put your own name on it, be as PC as you want--but leave the original words alone.
Treat the book as you should a quote. You don't get to change quoted material, no matter how much you think you can improve it with a few tweaks. It is what it is. Let it be
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We do get to "change quoted material." That's the reason quotes often include brackets that include a few words that help set the context; it's the reason we quote with ellipses to remove extraneous parts. It's unethical not to announce that there are changes, but there's no particular value in saying "it survives as a popular work as last published by the author, or it gets thrown into the dustbin of history."
It's also ridiculous to say "it's okay to translate to another language, which involves hundreds of editorial choices, but not to translate across time to today's language." Do you think translators work to re-create the exact language that *would have been used* at the time of original publication? If not, how is that any different from updating to more modern language in English?